One Thousand Years Dawn

A man stands firmly on a featureless terrain of dunes that stretches infinitely behind him into the horizon. In front of him rise and fall the tides of the eternally blue sea, veiled by a thin glistening curtain of the reflection of the dawning Sun, which artlessly pronounces its awakening across the new world. As the Sun travels across the sky, the world accompanies and ages. The companionship will last for one thousand years before the Sun finally disappears into the horizon forever and at last shines on the then moribund world, announcing the inevitable ceasing of all existence. The man’s fate is bound by that of the world, which will come to an end with the disappearance of the Sun. He waits calmly for the final judgment hours, unfaltering and determined in his stationary pose and position. No contempt or hesitation lies in his mind, but only a holy resolve and acceptance with his fated final judgement. This scene is depicted in One Thousand Years Dawn by John Gerrard, an Irish Artist who has exclusively worked with animations of computer-generated simulations throughout his artistic career. Gerrard’s works feature various subjects, from oil derricks to solar reserves to flags to animals. Gerrard and his team use advanced 3D scanning technology to recreate real existing scenes of these subjects in a completely virtual digital environment, using a similar technology to that of video game engines. One Thousand Years Dawn is one among Gerrard’s collection of computer-generated animations. It is displayed in a vacant room on a massive, borderless LED display. The scene illustrates a man staring into the dawning of the Sun as it rises imperceptibly slow from the horizon. The Sun is designed to reach its final destination in the sky in 3015 — a thousand years after the project was initiated in 2015 — only then to end as the man walks away from the scene when the sun fully sets and the animation stops. Inquiring into Gerrard’s virtual world, the audience inevitably confronts the question of why the man stands motionless for a thousand years in complete solitude. What might he be waiting for? The open-endedness of the animation invites the viewers to conjure wild speculation about what this animation might be about. Perhaps a promise or faith of the return of his fisherman father lost in a storm? Or the last human witnessing the final day on Earth before the explosion of the sun? What ultimately awaits him? Most importantly, is the one thousand years of waiting really meaningful and worthy? What is worth waiting a thousand years for? In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” author T.S. Eliot proclaims the dependency of individual artists on their respective traditions and that “no artist of any art[ ]has his complete meaning alone” (Eliot 37). To elaborate on the connection between the individual and the tradition, Eliot describes a reciprocal relationship between the two: “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it” (Eliot 37). The relationship can also be more generally applied to history, as expressed in the statement that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot 37). This reciprocal interaction between the present and the past is manifest in how Renaissance scholar Francesco Petrarch coined the term “Dark Ages” to describe the Middle Ages because the general sentiment of the time was to revive the humanist and rationalist tradition of the Greeks and Romans that are opposed to and historically replaced by the mysticism and scholasticism of the Medieval Ages. Similarly, Van Gogh and Franz Kafka were only recognized after they passed away because of their later influences. Thus, the value of an artist, an event, a movement, or anything in history can never be sufficiently determined while they are not entirely forgotten, for we never know if their relevance will re-emerge and inspire new thinking in the future. Looking back at One Thousand Years Dawn, perhaps the most crucial question is what happens at the end. Suppose his hypothetical fisherman father gets washed ashore and saved at the end. In that case, all the previous one thousand years are meaningful and necessarily all leading up to this moment. Suppose the man finally gives up when the Sun sets and walks away. In that case, the previous thousand years of waiting time will be completely meaningless and wasted in an absurdly arbitrary manner. The ending is so important that it completely changes the meaning of the previous one thousand years. Thus, the present and past do not determine the future; the future determines the past and the present. Ever since the announcement that “God is dead” by Existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and its scientific expression through the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin and other geologists and anthropologists, humans have started to doubt if there will ever be an ultimate ending to the world as previously promised by Christianity (Nietzsche 181). The world seems to operate perfectly independently even without humans, as it has been scientifically proven to have existed billions of years before human civilization and will likely exist for much longer after humans are non-existent. It seems as if judgment day may never come despite numerous predictions among the popular masses that it will happen in 2015 or 2012 or some other date. Nihilism emerges as a necessary product of the absence of a final ending. As the world may never end, the value of events or people in the past, present and future are never finally determined since, as Eliot has pointed out, “the past should be altered by the present (Eliot 37).” The value of everything, thus, perpetually fluctuates and is forever relativistic in the absence of a final determination. It then follows that if there is no clear ending or final determination to an animation or a story like in One Thousand Years Dawn, then all speculations about the meaning of the process are valid. Like in One Thousand Years Dawn, where there lacks a definite purpose for the one-thousand-year wait, then, aren’t we also unable to comprehend the true meaning of our lives if there is no ultimate ending? Humans similarly face the universal dilemma proposed by One Thousand Years Dawn: what is ultimately the meaning of everything, and what ultimately awaits us? As a reaction to the rise of nihilism and the death of God, many ideologies have arisen to offer clear visions of the future to establish definite connections and determinations in reality (Nietzsche 181). The Enlightenment project promised a future of a continuous realization of “equality, liberty, and fraternity” through the advancement of technology and the democratization of the government. Previous events in human history are justified and defined by it as necessary steps within this gradual process that eventually leads to the emancipation of humankind. Physicism establishes an ultimate sophisticated rational model for the world, where all existence and phenomena, including even the human mind, are reduced to and explained by the interplaying of infinitesimally tiny atoms, and the past, present, and future of the world as merely the arbitrary results of how these atoms interact with each other. Introducing these absolute systems attempts to apply a final determinate answer to all doubts and mysteries throughout human history by supplementing explanations for all phenomena. In the preface of one of the most seminal works of political philosophy, The Philosophy of the Right(1821), author Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declares the bewildering philosophical dictum: “what is rational is real; and what is real is rational” (The Philosophy of the Right 18). The dictum can be understood as a rejection of the Platonic notion that the idea or “the rational” is detached from reality, which, to Hegel, “is just as foolish to fancy [as] that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes” (18). Hegel denies the separation of the idea from reality. He believes that reality will manifest itself as rational if we approach it through the lens of reason. If we believe that history is a linear progression towards the gradual realization of the Enlightenment ideals, all historical events will be seen as necessary to achieve this purpose. The farthest from this ideal — before humans domesticated crops and animals and were hunter-gatherers — will be viewed as the seed of civilization. What is seen as against this ideal — the mysticism and feudalism of the Middle Ages replacing the Ancient Greeks and Romans — will be viewed as something necessary to be negated later by the republicanism and rationalism of the Enlightenment and dual revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, ideologies necessarily encompass all reality as long as we accept their final and determinant answer for the future. Applying the same reasoning, if a definite ending is provided to One Thousand Years Dawn, all the previous one thousand years will be viewed as intermediary stages that necessarily lead towards that specific ending. The nature of things depends not only on themselves but also on how they are ordered, determined, connected to others, and perceived through the subject’s perspective. We thus often observe a singular fact or event being interpreted drastically differently by people of opposing ideologies. In the case of the undeniable fact of Trump’s re-election in 2024, for example, we perceive general sympathizers of cultural conservatism or economic isolationists like Elon Musk celebrating it as “a fork in the road of human civilization,” victory against the "woke mind virus," and a signal to the start of the re-industrialization of the US that will bring back economic prosperity(Musk; Leparmentier). Anything against this narrative, like Trump’s tariffs’ indisputable negative implications on the American economy or the entirety of his policies serving the interests of and funded by the new elitist parasitic “Techno-oligarchs” — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc — is either muted or neglected or viewed as something necessary to achieve their final vision. To supporters of the Democratic Party and general cultural progressivists among popular Hollywood Celebrities, Trump’s reelection signals “a return to a more restrictive, some fear draconian time,” “a sign of deep nihilism,” or “a war on women”(Lee). Yet, they fail to reconcile with the fact that 45% of the women voters or 46% and 68% of Latinos and American Indigenous, respectively voted for Trump — I am amazed by how NBC News still refer to American Indigenous people as “American Indians,” I digress — despite his reputation of “racism, misogyny, [and] xenophobia”(NBC). Or, they simply dismiss these voters as deceived, misguided, or even unintelligent or evil. Today’s world is a fragile equilibrium of clashing ideologies, which is now near the brink of complete collapse as people become more divided because of their beliefs, failure or rejection to understand and recognize others’ perspectives and interests. Gerrard’s Exercise(Dunhuang) displays an animation of a game featuring 39 workers who are navigating a complex maze-like road network in the middle of the Gobi desert. Every time two participants meet, one of the two participants will sit and wait until the game finishes. This process continues for around 24 to 36 hours until only one worker remains walking. After the camera rotates around the worker who remains standing, the game then resets, and the entire process begins again. The sight of this animation induces a sentiment of a faint, at first barely noticeable eeriness or uncanniness. The mechanical movements of the workers and the immense absurdity caused by the futility and arbitrariness of their tasks seem as if they are merely puppets manipulated by some omnipotent, all-encompassing invisible force. What is it to be one of the participants in the game? Would I be aware that a secret force is controlling me, or would I be deceived into believing that all my actions are perfectly autonomous? Or, perhaps, there is no omnipotent force. Perhaps all actions are entirely autonomous, and the game happens to be a mere coincidence stemming from the totality of autonomous actions. How are we dissimilar from the participants of Exercise(Dunhuang)? Upon deep contemplation about the political and ideological world of today, we inevitably ask. Do not many of us also believe that a secret underlying force that we call physical laws or other ideologies governs us and the world, like the workers’ belief in some omnipotent force? Do not many of us even fight for these ideologies thoughtlessly, regarding people of different or opposing beliefs as our enemies, like how the participants of Exercise(Dunhuang) are like puppets of some invisible force? Confronted by the all-encompassing narratives of ideologies, individual subjective will is reduced to a constituent of a grander cause with independent logic foreign to them. I act in a particular way because of the particular interaction among the atoms that constitute me or because of my social class, ethnicity, nationality, etc. Individuals are alienated to become vehicles of some greater determinant purpose. They become mobilized by a particular ideology and separated into opposing factions and camps. Hegel refers to this manipulation of people by an underlying general idea as “the cunning of reason,” which “remains in the background, untouched and uninjured” while “it sets the [individual] passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty, and suffers loss” (Lectures on the Philosophy of History 34). Upon first impression of the notion of “the cunning of reason,” we might envision an image of a Machiavellian dictator who manipulates and deceives individuals for their cause and purposes — like the absent establisher of the rules in Exercise(Dunhuang) or a perpetrator of ideologies and opportunistic populist leaders like Donald Trump or Benito Mussolini or other groups of the ruling bureaucratic elite like “the deep state” (Lectures on the Philosophy of History 34). This omnipotent dictator is exemplified and personified in The Grand Inquisitor, a poem within Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Brothers Karamazov, recited by the second brother, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov. The poem depicts a fictional story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in 15th-century Spain during the Spanish Inquisition — a period when a Catholic “judicial” institution was established to “combat heresy in Spain” by enforcing “infamously brutal methods” that are targeted chiefly towards its Jewish and Islamic populations(Ryan). The Grand Inquisitor — who appears as a “tall, gaunt-looking old man of nearly four-score years and ten, with a stern, withered face, and deeply sunken eyes” — is an embodiment of the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition movement, dogmatically enforcing earthly judgments and punishments based on fundamentalist Christian beliefs(Dostoevsky). Upon Christ’s return, the Inquisitor confronts him, accusing him of the mistake of granting freedom to Humankind instead of fooling them into believing final and definite meanings to life: Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread. This is the truth. But what has happened? Instead of getting hold of man's freedom, Thou has enlarged it still more! Hast Thou again forgotten that to man rest and even death are preferable to a free choice between the knowledge of Good and Evil? Nothing seems more seductive in his eyes than freedom of conscience, and nothing proves more painful. And behold! instead of laying a firm foundation whereon to rest once for all man's conscience, Thou hast chosen to stir up in him all that is abnormal, mysterious, and indefinite, all that is beyond human strength…(Dostoevsky) The inquisitor’s confrontation speech highlights the existential dread evoked by the absence of definite meanings. He advocates for the alternate option of deceiving the masses by “noble lie[s]” of fundamentalist Christian dogmas that provide final meanings to life, to what is “good and evil” to rid them of the “painful” “freedom of conscience”(Dostoevsky). He further believes that the “[u]nrest, [c]onfusion, [and m]isery” that follow as a consequence of freedom can only be alleviated by the “[m]iracle, [m]ystery and [a]uthority” sermonized by a ruling elite, and that the happiness of people can only be achieved by indoctrinating them with some form of an absolutist ideology(Dostoevsky). In the essay “Criticism,” author Matthew Goulish addresses the “irreducible complexity [that] seems to characterize the late twentieth century itself(43).” “[W]e face infinite differences – individual or cultural details, opposing traditions, idiosyncratic forms and setting,” Goulish states and concludes, “[a]s a result, each field structures itself by propagating its own specialized vocabulary(43).” We could rightfully claim that the “irreducible complexity” of reality has continued in the 21st century, with different fields and industries even becoming more stratified and complex as they continue to develop, reaffirming “the impossibility of the task of knowing everything”(43). With the collapse and failure of the great social experiment of the Soviet Union in the last century, this tendency seems to have also permeated into the field of politics, where people have lost faith in a centralized bureaucracy to regulate the market, as "no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control" — a form of skepticism of the power of people’s rationality to control society facing its “irreducible complexity”(Hayek 14; Goulish 43). The beginning of the 21st century marks the complete victory of unregulated financial capitalism and decentralization, with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency shrinking and limiting the size of the American bureaucracy, promising tax cuts and reduction in federal spending. Additionally, people seem to have increasingly lost faith in the electoral democratic system to elect a centralized political party to represent their will and interests. It is estimated that “close to 90 million Americans, roughly 36% of the eligible voting age population, did not vote,” a number “greater than the number of people who voted for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris”(Otte). The remaining vote is almost evenly divided between the only two real candidates — 49.8% for Donald Trump and 48.3% for Kamala Harris(CNN). The extremely politically and ideologically divisive society of America today questions if universally accepted truths still exist. We have entered a “post-truth” era where, due to the “irreducible complexity” of reality, we have given up on centralized human will and universal truth — which are characteristics of ideologies — to actively control and shape the world(Goulish 43). The vision of a centralized dictatorial elite in Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor may never be realized. What has instead emerged is the concealed decentralized bureaucracy in Austro-Hungarian writer Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. In The Trial, the protagonist, Joseph K finds himself to be convicted of a crime that is never articulated to him. To investigate what crime he was convicted of and prove his innocence, K sets on the later known to be an impossible task of delving into the bureaucratic system of the judicial branch, only to find himself disoriented in the maze of layers of ambiguous legal procedures, complex government departments and relations, and implicit rules and laws. When K seeks to make clear the subsequent procedures regarding his case, for example, his lawyer explains: The trial will have entered a stage where no more help can be given, where it's being processed in courts to which no-one has any access, where the defendant cannot even be contacted by his lawyer. You come home one day and find all the documents you've submitted, which you've worked hard to create and which you had the best hopes for, lying on the desk, they've been sent back as they can't be carried through to the next stage in the trial, they're just worthless scraps of paper. It doesn't meant that the case has been lost, not at all, or at least there is no decisive reason for supposing so, it's just that you don't know anything more about the case and won't be told anything of what's happening. (Kafka 63) The mystery regarding the Trial is that the law never manifests itself in one centralized will. There is never a figure who comprehends or represents the law and can announce a final verdict to K or explain to him the crime he had committed. Each individual only plays the role of a component of the system, who is told to follow some arbitrary orders, where the consequences of and purposes for these orders are not exposed to them. Even at the end of the novel when K is killed by two executioners, he is still completely ignorant of the crime he is “guilty” of. We are approaching another future, perhaps, in which humans have lost their grasp on the very creation they have created. Where the all-encompassing system enforces absurd and arbitrary orders that are beyond our comprehension, as no centralized state represents and articulates it. As a result of the failure of ideologies and a centralized ruling elite, we again face the nihilism of “the death of God”(Nietzsche 181). But in its debris, nothing can be reconstructed like during the Enlightenment. Without the regulation of the bureaucracy, late-stage financial capitalism has created a machine that runs according to its own laws of perpetual and unrestrained expansion. As a result, we find the world to operate in a way foreign to us and “the cunning of reason” to be concealed from each individual. Like K, we may never know what crime we are convicted of one day, as there is no one to ask. Reality becomes a “black box” where only the outcome is visible to us while the process is entirely hidden and therefore seemingly arbitrary. Two oil derricks mechanically drill and extract on a flat, barren field. The complete absence of human subjects in the scene stands in stark contrast with the restless, animated movements of the machines. The camera rotates around the metal frameworks as it captures their perpetual movements. This scene is another one of John Gerrard’s simulated realities, titled Universal. It is a virtual recreation of a pair of oil derricks that are installed near Calgary, Canada by the company Universal. Gerrard’s Solar Reserve depicts a solar thermal plant in the center that is encircled by thousands of blue solar panels facing towards the direction of the Sun. Similar to Universal, no traces of humans are visible in the image. Together, the thousands of solar panels and the thermal plant resemble a circular shape where the thermal plant is located relatively right to the center of the circle. Many of Gerrard’s works like Universal or Solar Reserve are centered around large machines operating on their own without the presence of humans. Upon the sight of the blue ocean formed by the immense number of solar panels, we are confronted by the fact that machines today have pronounced themselves as something with so much strength, complexity, and intricacy. “The irreducibility” of their sheer number and their perpetual motion discloses the “irreducible complexity” of the energy industries and machines in general(Goulish 43). Furthermore, the self-sufficiency of the movements of these machines without the interference of human beings elicits a terrifying vision of reality, where the world runs according to a set of mechanist and arbitrary laws utterly foreign to individual subjective will, like it is revealed in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. What distinguishes Universal, Solar Reserve, and Gerrard’s other works from traditional cinematography mediums is that his animations are rendered by computers in real time rather than being pre-recorded. Additionally, his animations are purely computer-generated as they do not use photographs taken in real life directly. They are consequently self-sufficient and self-contained, as there are no external connections or constraints — unlike in movies where the lighting, time when it is recorded, texture, and subject matter are reliant on external factors in reality. Compared to other traditional animations, additionally, Gerrard’s works contain more of a sense of depth — as they are not flat images like moving pictures, but a virtual reality with x, y, and z dimensions, calculated lighting, objects with sizes, surfaces, and collisions, etc. Thus, His animation forms self-contained virtual worlds parallel to reality. Yet, these worlds are confined and inapproachable to the viewers. We can only perceive what happens inside and the changes that occur due to its internal connections but cannot interact or engage with it externally. What solution, then, does Gerrard’s work offer as a cure to the unbridled self-destructing late-stage financial capitalist world of today? Unfortunately, Gerrard doesn’t offer a solution. His simulated worlds, however, may seem to be more connected with reality than they first appear to be. Gerrard’s animations are a symptom of our world today. With the rapid growth in the complexity of machinery, industry, and technology and the paradoxical decrease in the democratic representation of the masses, the shrinking of the bureaucracy, and the decentralization of power, we are entering an age where the world, like the fictional worlds Gerrard creates, is inaccessible to individuals, operating according to some concealed logic that human rationality and will cannot positively interfere; even if our actions do produce consequences, we would not be able to plan or predict these consequences because of the “irreducible complexity” of reality(Goulish 43). Gerrard’s artworks precisely capture and embody the zeitgeist of today’s world, inducing a sense of alienation as we approach his inaccessible intricate worlds similar to the feeling of alienation as we approach the inaccessible intricate worlds of reality. We thus see ourselves in Gerrard’s worlds as participants in Exercise(Dunhuang) whose actions are determined by a set of arbitrary rules utterly foreign to them. These works are inaccessible, self-contained, arbitrary, governed by giant perpetually moving machines, and have no place for free human actions precisely because the world today is like that. Why then should we seek an answer, solution, meaning, or purpose in Gerrard’s works if the world today offers no answer, solution, meaning, or purpose? What then are we waiting for, ultimately, if we know that there will be no ultimate ending to this world, no final judgment, and all the meanings are values are perpetually relativistic? If our creation becomes incomprehensible to us, freeing itself of our control? What future ultimately awaits us? We ask again. Should we still be optimistic about a future where humans will regain their dignity, positively change and shape the world to alleviate all pain and suffering, and confidently announce that our lives and the world are meaningful? How long are we willing to wait for? Is a thousand years enough, or may it take longer than a thousand years? Still, we should be hopeful for the future. Like the man in One Thousand Years Dawn, we should always stand firmly on the ground and wait for something, even if we are not sure what awaits us at the end. We should always face the sun, hoping for a miracle at the end of the thousand years, even if we will have to wait longer than one thousand years, even if it happens by then that we are no longer remembered. When it happens, it will remember and acknowledge the long wait. Then, we will again announce ourselves anew across the world, like the dawning Sun, establishing a new order and meaning to life. We will shape the world according to these visions and purposes, even if they are proven to fail again. We always seek meaning, fail, but seek meaning again. We will never find final resolutions with the world until perhaps we no longer exist, but we will always seek resolutions.